As I described in my previous blog How the Mobile Industry Will Make Money in the Future, the history of the mobile industry has involved huge and successful waves of revenue growth. Lucrative revenues from the first wave of voice and the second messaging wave have crested and are now in decline. Mobile data access has taken up much of the shortfall, comprising well over one-half of the total revenue of most MNOs. However, the crest of this third growth wave is visible on the horizon as critical industry disruptors begin to shape a new mobile world.

The question for mobile operators everywhere is, what is this fourth, or next, wave of mobile growth?

Unfortunately there is no obvious tsunami-size fourth monetization wave cresting on the horizon for mobile operators. Unlike the preceding three waves, there will be no gold rush created by a single killer app, such as voice, messaging, or data. A lot of gold still remains in the mobile business, but it is going to come from multiple sources and require some sophisticated mining techniques.

Cisco believes that there are four key strategic thrusts, or monetization areas, for operators to create new value from their mobile business.

Let’s take a closer look at location analytics generated at Cisco Live! If you haven’t seen CMX Analytics before, let me tell you: it’s powerful. There are three pieces of CMX Analytics: Dashboard, Analytics and Reports, all generated by the location data from the MSE. Here are a few key views from the show floor:

1. Dashboard: The CMX Dashboard features a number of customizable widgetsthat visualize location data such as dwell time and device count by zone or by time.

Hourly Visitors for South Halls on Tuesday May 20

Tuesday marked a steady flow through the day with the World of Solutions and breakout sessions all day. You see that spike at 5pm? That’s when the beverages and refreshments came out—and then you see people tapering off round 7pm to head out for dinner.

As organizations seek ways to maintain real-time connections with their workforce and customers in an increasingly digital and mobile-centered world, the growth of mobile cloud will be a major force in shaping the business landscape and future tech decisions. This blog series will explore how the convergence of mobility and cloud will deliver unprecedented transformation for all organizations. This post will highlight the growth of mobile cloud and how any business in any vertical stands to benefit.

Mobile communications have fundamentally changed the way business works. At the same time, cloud computing has become the new way of delivering and charging for IT services and functionality. This collision of technology – the “mobile cloud” – stands to significantly increase the overall value of mobility, as well as radically alter the way employees work and businesses operate.

In short, what we know about mobile cloud today can be summed up in three parts:

1. Mobile cloud is growing. A leading industry report estimates mobile cloud services will increase at a staggering pace from $500 million today to $4.4 billion in 2017, a scant three years away. It’s also important to note that hybrid cloud environments are a major force in mobile cloud growth. By connecting private and public clouds, organizations can deliver the mobile, collaborative and rich video cloud services that enable today’s new connected experiences.

2. Mobile cloud is the beginning of an evolution – and it’s being driven by cloud-based applications. Mobile cloud will change not only where employees can work, but this convergence of two technology tools will completely change the way business works. A key component of this is the growth of applications in the cloud, with personalized experiences delivered in real-time, everywhere and anywhere. According to a recent Cisco study, 96% of IT decision makers said that collaboration apps are primarily accessed on mobile by employees. This behavior also supports the prediction that the percentage of enterprise apps adapted for mobile will grow from 31% to 42% in the next year.

3. Mobile cloud is a significant part of moving the Internet of Everything (IoE) forward. As people, processes and things become connected and always on the go, more data will be communicated through mobile cloud. For example, Cisco VNI data predicts that mobile cloud traffic will grow 12-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 64 percent.

Earlier this week you learned about the network at Cisco Live! If you attended the event this year, you’ll also have noticed that there was a brand new extension of the event in Moscone West. This was DevNet, the first developer-facing zone Cisco has ever brought to life, just in time for the 25th anniversary of the conference. DevNet featured a whole array of activities for the dev-inclined Cisco customer: learning labs, tech talks on both a main stage for thought leadership and techie details in an API theater, and a hackathon. CMX was one of the key technologies on display in the DevNet zone, and our CMX engineering team was super excited to see our technology in the spotlight.

As many of you know, CMX offers a rich set of APIs enabling developer community to develop, enhance and customize location-enabled applications. The highlight of the show for me was the DevNet Hackathon, a real 24 hour hackathon right in the DevNet Zone–another first for Cisco. Our very own Mobility Services API and CMX SDK were part of the featured technology sets for people to work with to create location-enabled apps using real-time intelligence from the Mobility Services Engine (MSE). It was really fun to be working with developers from many different countries and awesome to see our APIs and SDK brought to life. See for yourself!

The ability to summon emergency assistance by using a phone to call 9-1-1 has been ingrained in our society for more than 40 years. For a successful emergency response, it is critical that the responders receive accurate location information. Traditional wired-line telephony is able to use the location of the physical wires as a source of information for caller location, whereas wireless technologies require more exotic mechanisms to locate a 9-1-1 caller.

Current trends expose risks in the emergency response system as we know it:

More and more 9-1-1 calls being made with mobile devices that are not mapped to a physical phone tied to a physical location in a venue.

Limited GPS location capability indoors can make it difficult to pinpoint the exact location of a 9-1-1 caller in a multistory building.

Accurate caller location within a building is vital for a timely response to an emergency. With more people using cell phones while indoors, the delays that can occur when emergency responders must rely on outdoor location technologies used inside a building are becoming all too common. This challenge can be compounded in large buildings with many floors and many rooms on each floor.

TCS and Cisco meet this challenge by using the Wi-Fi network to make emergency response faster and more efficient with:

Seamlessly connection of the cellular and Wi-Fi location control planes, providing results within a few meters of accuracy

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